Nora Raleigh Baskin

Relates how the lives of four children living in different parts of the country intersect and are affected by the events of September 11, 2001.

Hank, Nathan, Jeremy, and Anabel deal with the realities of middle school basketball, including family pressure, a series of coaches with very different personalities and agendas, and what it means to be a team--and a friend.

Twelve-year-old Gabby feels that she needs a mother to help her grow into a woman, so when things between her father and his latest girlfriend do not work out, Gabby sets off for the last place she remembers seeing her own mother.

Twelve-year-old best friends and relatives, Julia and Eliza are happy to spend the summer together while Julia's mother is serving in the National Guard in Iraq but when they meet a neighborhood boy, their close relationship begins to change.

Eleven-year-old Ruby Danes has a real best friend for the first time ever, but agonizes over whether or not to tell her a secret she has never shared with anyone--that her mother has been in prison since Ruby was five--and over whether to express her anger to her mother.

Natalie, almost sixteen, sneaks away from her Connecticut home and takes the bus to Florida, looking for the mother who abandoned her father and her when she was ten years old.

"Joy Fonseca is dreading her 13th birthday, dreading being reminded again about her best friend Lukas's senseless death on this day, one year ago -- and dreading the fact he may have heard what she accidentally blurted to him the night before. Or maybe she's more worried he didn't hear. Either way, she's decided: she's going to finally open the first clue to their annual birthday scavenger hunt Lukas left for her the morning he died, hoping the rest...